Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future Podcast Por Douglas Stuart McDaniel arte de portada

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

De: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Ciencia
Episodios
  • Citizen One S2:E2 – 8 Minutes 20 Seconds – Housing After Banking

    Citizen One S2:E2 – 8 Minutes 20 Seconds – Housing After Banking
    Sep 23 2025
    What if housing were designed not for banks, but for photons? This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong’s work, and in this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, they join Douglas Stuart McDaniel to explore how light, not leverage, might reshape the foundations of our cities.Their book, 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, takes its title from the time it takes sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth. It’s a cosmic measure of abundance that reframes housing as energy infrastructure rather than financial collateral. For over a century, mortgage debt, land speculation, and securitization have dictated how homes are built and who gets to live in them. But Bell and Seong argue that in an age of climate crisis and financial fragility, sunlight itself may be the more profound constraint—and the greater opportunity.Personal Memory, Planetary FuturesThe cosmic is always personal. Bell recalls his father’s NASA work in the 1970s, capturing X-ray images of the sun and noting that a solar flare could generate enough energy to power civilization for 2,000 years. It took him decades to fully grasp that lesson: climate change, urban heat sinks, and the precarity of fossil fuels were already being observed before the politics of climate entered public life. That memory threads through the book’s central metaphor: fossil fuels that took millions of years to form have been consumed in just 150 years, while the sun’s energy flows to us continuously, freely, and without depletion.From Fragility to AbundanceHousing today, according to Bell and Seong, is propped up by central banks holding trillions in securitized assets. Land values have skyrocketed past housing values since the 1970s, outpacing the cost of actual structures and embedding scarcity into the DNA of our cities. Housing, as Eunjeong puts it, is a “fragile system,” one that depends on leverage and debt at unsustainable scales. Yet against this fragility stands the constancy of the sun—renewable energy that arrives every eight minutes, inexhaustible and replenishing. Designing with photons shifts the conversation from scarcity to abundance, from fragile debt to resilient infrastructure.The Singularity of Housing FinanceBell and Seong also describe financialized housing as its own kind of singularity—an event horizon where debt, derivatives, and central bank interventions spiral beyond sustainability. Numbers themselves bend space until stability becomes illusion. Like a black hole at the center of urban life, the gravitational pull of housing finance threatens to consume itself. The question becomes: what lies beyond that horizon, and can the light of solar abundance bend the trajectory toward a new civic future?Architecture in Space and TimeAt its core, this is not just an economic critique but a philosophical reorientation. Architecture has always been bound up with space and time—whether through the Renaissance canvas, Picasso’s Cubist experiments, or Einstein’s relativity. Bell and Seong extend this lineage by asking what it means to design when your home is literally recharged by the sun every eight minutes. Housing becomes spacetime choreography: shadow as a design tool, roofs as collectors, facades as thermodynamic instruments. The house ceases to be a fixed asset and instead becomes a living system.Automation and Employment FuturesThis reframing of housing also intersects with the future of work. As automation accelerates, employment itself becomes less stable, and the wage-based housing model—where mortgages are tethered to decades of salaried labor—grows more precarious. Imagine robots fabricating walls while displaced workers become stewards of solar grids—automation dismantles one model of housing but seeds another. Housing, in this light, is not simply shelter but a platform for employment transition—where automation displaces old labor models but also seeds new ones, from energy stewardship to urban technology ecosystems.Reimagining the Solar PolisOut of this emerges the vision of the “solar polis”—a civic imaginarium where zoning follows wattage, not acreage, and homes become nodes in a distributed energy grid. It’s not just about efficiency or green design. It’s about rethinking citizenship, equity, and urban form around an abundant and democratic energy source. The solar polis is both speculative and practical: it asks us to imagine new forms of density and distribution, new settlement patterns, and a new contract between energy, housing, and civic life.Beyond Prefab: Housing as Advanced ManufacturingCrucially, Bell and Seong argue this future won’t come from incremental prefab housing models. Instead, it requires the leap of advanced manufacturing and material science, the same ecosystems that produced aerospace and consumer electronics. Imagine chemically tempered glass that heats and cools, walls that act as energy storage, ...
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    1 h y 33 m
  • Citizen One S2:E1 — Waffle House Urbanism, Resilient Cities, and a New Literary Frontier

    Citizen One S2:E1 — Waffle House Urbanism, Resilient Cities, and a New Literary Frontier
    Sep 9 2025
    Welcome back to the Season Two premiere of Citizen One, Exploring Our Urban Future. I'm your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, currently back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This season, I'm changing up the rhythm and structure of Citizen One a bit. Each episode will include, as always, a deep exploration of urbanism and the past, present, and future of cities, followed by a segment on narrative architecture, a way of framing stories, speculative futures, and imagination around visual storytelling and worldbuilding, one of my favorite topics. A Quick Book UpdateBut first, an update about the book. Due to seismic shifts in the global smart city arena, I regret to inform you that my book, Citizen One, will not be published this fall, but for a very good reason. I freely admit that this feels a bit like when Bill Gates released The Road Ahead in 1995, and he barely mentioned the internet. He had to quickly rewrite a year later to keep up with a fast-moving new reality.However, I'd rather pause a book than miss or gloss over an important shift everyone will be talking about for some time to come about the future of cities. In particular, I'm setting off to do some sorely needed research on AI models that read satellite and geospatial sensor data that inform the resilience of cities. And I'm also working on a deeper focus on people-centered governance over gadget-centered innovation. And that brings me to resilience — not just in manuscripts, but in the everyday fabric of our cities.Waffle House UrbanismThe FEMA Index says it best: if your Waffle House is still open, you’ll survive the storm. If it’s shuttered, it’s already too late. That grim little measure says everything about the American built environment — disposable, fragile, engineered for throughput and profit rather than for people. Waffle House has perhaps become one of the last civic institutions standing — a 24-hour diner doubling as lighthouse, while the rest of the built environment collapses into gas stations, payday lenders, and drive-throughs.Resilience isn’t just an urban design principle. It’s also a narrative one — how we remember, imagine, and refuse to accept sameness as destiny. There are places that prove otherwise — districts where walkability, memory, and human scale still matter. Savannah’s street grid, Portland’s Pearl District, San Francisco’s Mission. They remind us resilience can be designed into the bones of a city rather than outsourced to a 24-hour diner.Introducing Premium Pulp FictionSo I am super excited about this second segment on world building storytelling, we're going back a few millennia for a really good reason. This is about worldbuilding, storytelling, and the launch of Premium Pulp Fiction, beginning with my upcoming historical epic novel, Ashes of Empire: Ghost Emperor, coming in early 2026. So let's dive in. Every city is a story, even ancient Babylon, how it was built, how it worked. What gods were worshiped there. And so as a story, a city is not a metaphor, it's a fact. Cities are imagined before they are built. From the carved thresholds of Petra to the pylons of Luxor, the places we inherit were designed not only to shelter people, but to embody power, belief, and survival.That act of imagining, of turning ideas into places is now what we call world building. And it isn't just ancient. It's the foundation of what I've been working on with my friend and collaborator, Olivier Pron, one of the great concept artists and visual storytellers of our time. Over the summer, as you may have seen in a prior episode, Olivier and I set up camp in the Dordogne in Southwest France for about two weeks, deep in the Le Périgord Noir, a landscape already steeped in its own layers of history, caves, cave paintings, and memory. There we continued developing an AI powered design and storytelling workflow that we're pretty excited about, where we're blending concept art, narrative, and digital tools into something that lets us move seamlessly between page, screen, and sound. It's part cinema, part architecture, and part literature. Because part of what we've done here is developed a platform where it's easy to imagine not just the future of cities, but also their past and present. You want to reimagine a coastal community in Mississippi, or you want to reimagine what Babylon looked like in the third century BCE? That's what we can quickly mock up, prototype and explore from a worldbuilding perspective. And so that process has become the seed for something larger. This new literary line I'm calling Premium Pulp Fiction. These are going to be stories that span genres, historical, speculative futurism, noir, science fiction, but all grounded in the same philosophy of pulp fiction with depth, narrative with muscle, fiction that is as cinematic on the page as it is in your imagination. So when I talk about worldbuilding here, I'm talking about more than ruins or futuristic skylines. I'm talking about ...
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    41 m
  • Unearthing the Future

    Unearthing the Future
    Aug 12 2025
    Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. Others barely tolerate your presence, indifferent to your wonder. I’ve traveled enough—across continents, cultures, and climates—to know the difference. I’ve stood on volcanic cliffs in the Aegean, wandered the souks of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, traced the edges of fjords and desert plateaus, and walked through cities that practically begged to be admired. But admiration isn’t the same as belonging. Most places, no matter how beautiful, remind you that you’re just passing through.But then there are the rare ones, like here in Le Périgord Noir, that refuse to play that game. They don’t care if you’re ready. They just are. And if you’re lucky, they let you feel it—the hum of the earth beneath your feet, the mineral memory in the air, the collapse of centuries into a single breath.The Dordogne valley caught me off guard in a way I didn’t expect. In some respects, it echoes my once-familiar mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee—not in landscape alone, but in something deeper, more atmospheric. The Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains hold you close with a soft, green hush, like an old song you half-remember. Their beauty is familiar, almost familial—humid, fragrant, and gently worn.But here, in Le Périgord Noir, the feeling turns—earthier, older, more elemental. And not just geologically, but civilizationally. This is a land that remembers. Its caves still cradle the ochre-stained breath of Paleolithic hands, and the hills carry the weight of Roman roads, templar and medieval fortresses, and hamlets both vanished and persistent. Time doesn't layer here—it seeps, settles, seeps forth again. You can feel it in the chill that clings to the stone walls of a half-collapsed barn in which a wild duck nurses her eggs, in the way the path bends not for efficiency but because it always has.The streams smell of limestone and leaf rot, edged with the scent of mushroom caps and waterlogged lichen. Fungi cling to the bases of black oaks, and the sun doesn’t pour through the trees so much as filter—dim, precise, like a cathedral’s light catching dust motes in mid-air. Spruce needles mix with smoke from a distant chimney. Every breath reminds you: something ancient is still alive here.They call it Noir for a reason—not just the color of the soil or the shade of the truffles hidden beneath it, but for the quality of the light itself. The darkness gathers in the understory, where ferns and moss curl low and quiet, and tree trunks rise like stone pillars out of shadow. It’s a darkness that feels cultivated, patient. Above, the canopy breaks open in sudden, holy shafts—sunlight not as warmth, but as revelation. The contrast plays tricks on your sense of depth, as if the forest is folding in on itself, layering time and silence. You walk through it as if trespassing in a forgotten prayer.I’d come to the Dordogne to spend the week with my friend, Olivier Pron—artist, world-builder, philosopher by accident and craftsman by blood—the fire already lit, the wine already breathing as we settled in to discuss a new project. The timeless, family home– built around a medieval bread oven–was perched quietly on land that had been occupied without interruption for half a million years, and it was already speaking to me.The hamlet where Olivier’s family farm sits consists of about five houses, and it isn’t marked by signage or ceremony. It’s not a destination. It’s a slow-breathing fold in the land, tucked just 900 meters from the glittering patience of the Dordogne River. A narrow and crooked paved path winds you into it, though to call it a “road” is already generous. More like a stone-lined vein leading you to the marrow of something older than memory.The first thing you notice is the minerality—a texture in the air, underfoot, in the bones of the buildings. The soil here resists. Orchards struggle. Fruit trees lean slightly off-axis like they’ve grown wise to disappointment. This is no Eden. The land doesn’t yield sweetness easily. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a place of abundance—it’s a place of resilience. The alluvial soils from the Lentinol—a nearby stream that swells and spills into a 100-year-old lake when it rains too hard—remind you that even modest water remembers its path.Five centuries ago, this stream—one that today barely warrants a name on a map—powered eight mills. You don’t need a cathedral to anchor a civilization. Sometimes a mill is enough.And while most of the world has moved on to stainless steel and silicon chips, Le Périgord Noir never quite signed the contract. The rhythms here are older, rooted in muscle, weather, and inheritance. Goat herders still walk the same limestone trails their grandfathers did, guiding shaggy-haired chèvres du Massif Central—hardy climbers with amber eyes and a taste for steep, unforgiving terrain. The sheep—mostly ...
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    27 m
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